I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to aviation technology, enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

The cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market is a funny one – with SAP‘s on-again, off-again cloud product Business ByDesign currently being on the back burner, NetSuite has pretty much had the entire market for mid-sized companies wanting a cloud ERP to themselves. At the lower end of town there are a large number of cloud accounting products for SMBs, and Intacct provides an answer to companies that have outgrown small solutions but aren’t yet ready for a full-blown ERP. In the true mid-market ERP area we’d only really had NetSuite offering a compelling “pure cloud” solution.

That situation took an interesting twist a couple of weeks ago with the announcement by FinancialForce that it had acquired Supply Chain Management vendor Less Software and Human Capital Management vendor Vana Workforce. This isn’t the first time FinancialForce have made a strategic acquisition, a couple of years ago they took on the Professional Services Automation product created by the large cloud consulting firm Appirio. So we’ve now got a financial management company that has offerings within the fold that deliver HR functions, supply chain enablement and professional services support – that starts to get mighty interesting when seen in the context of NetSuite’s business.

All three of these acquisitions have been of companies that built products on the Salesforce.comSalesforce.com platform – what that means in real terms is that all these products share a common data model, code base and customization model – one of the reasons that Salesforce is investing so heavily in creating its Salesforce1 platform is their knowledge that a group of products built on a single platform starts to become far more compelling to customers than a pseudo-suite created partly through acquiring disparate solutions.

Interestingly one of the key marketing messages that NetSuite itself articulates is that by using a single suite, customers avoid the necessity of creating a “hairball” of specific integrations – that nightmare scenario where multiple solutions need to be tied together that use different code bases and data structures. While it is true that modern integration vendors make this process easier than ever before – it’s still much hard than simply using multiple products built on the same platform. Which is where FinancialForce comes in.

When FinancialForce was created a few years ago, some questioned the prudence of building the product on a platform that was primarily focused on Customer Relationship Management. Indeed financial applications, with their reliance on Paccioli’s concept of double entry, place particular requirements on the database and core architecture upon which they sit. FinancialForce had its work cut out to reconcile the needs of a financial application with the ability of a CRM platform to deliver.

But it would appear from speaking to FinancialForce customers that this issue has been resolved and the company now delivers a robust financial engine. But what was a barrier in the past, the need to build on an existing platform, bears fruit today as the company can snap up other products built on Force.com and have them deeply integrated within their own product from the get go.

By making these strategic acquisitions, FinancialForce has given itself the ability to articulate a true ERP story, but at the same time it also has the ability to articulate its own platform play – by leveraging the Force.com platform on which FinancialForce is built, customers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are able to create specific solutions that integrate natively with the core application but meet the specific needs of particular verticals.

Of course the space isn’t standing still – NetSuite has been trying to deliver a more compelling platform – one that will truly enable third parties to build native applications easily and avert customer integration pain. At the same time SAP will eventually deliver a viable story with ByDesign – while it’s been a long time coming, surely SAP will eventually get it right? Either way – and in the mean time – FinancialForce is starting to really reap the rewards of the design decisions it made back on day one – it’s built a great product, leveraged a strong platform and in doing so has created it’s own platform on which a vibrant ecosystem can develop.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. Read more about Ben here.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.